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Do I have to give up any of my own story to understand that of the Poles?

Eetta Prince-Gibson
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Published: 16 August 2019

Last updated: 4 March 2024

I HAVE COME TO WARSAW with a small group of Israeli journalists, sponsored by the Polish Press Club in cooperation with the Jerusalem Press Club (both are part of an international network of Press Clubs).  We have been invited for four days to engage in an Israeli/Jewish-Polish dialogue.

The head of the Warsaw Press Club, Jaroslaw Wlodarczyk, is warm, friendly, and attentive, with a quick, urbane sense of humour. Warsaw is cosmopolitan and inviting, with a charming Old City. Our hosts have arranged everything carefully and kindly. Mini-buses and taxis ferry us from place to place.  Our hotel is comfortable and modern; the cable TV provides international channels and the Wi-Fi is strong and reliable. The juice at breakfast is freshly squeezed, the pastries are fresh and the coffee is delicious. Kosher food is available.

Yet I am not sure what we are supposed to be dialoguing about. Reconciliation? Forgiveness? The search for “justice”?

Our hosts tell us they want to reach new understandings of the relationships between Poles and Jews, to understand that they have suffered, too. That they, too, were victims - first under the Nazis, then under the Soviets, who thought of them as lesser humans, who wanted to enslave them, who destroyed their multi-cultural Polish heritage.

The Poles as victims? But I had always been taught that “the Poles were worse than the Germans.” I remember the hushed conversations among the adults when I was a child; how they both didn’t, and did, want me to know about what had happened during the Holocaust, only a decade before I was born. I took in the stories about the people who were murdered, who disappeared, never even buried, in the Jewish graveyard that was Poland.

Am I betraying my family and my people if I listen to a different narrative?  Can I do that? I’m not sure I want to.

Our first stop is the Okopowa Street Cemetery in Warsaw, one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe, in use since the beginning of the 19th century.  It seems somehow fitting that the day is dull and dreary.

Spreading over some 75 acres, there are more than 250,000 tombstones here, some still legible, many destroyed.

Our tour of the cemetery is led by Michal Lasczckowski, CEO of Poland’s Cultural Heritage Foundation. The Foundation, he tells us, is dedicated to protecting and promoting the national heritage of Poland, most significantly, the conservation and restoration of the Okopowa Street Cemetery, which remains the most visible site of the Jewish presence in Poland.

Restoration and care for Jewish cemeteries would nominally be the responsibility of the Jewish community. But there are only some 300 members of the Warsaw Jewish community, most of whom are elderly and the community could not take upon themselves the restoration of the cemetery, a situation common to the  some 1200 Jewish cemeteries scattered throughout Poland.

For this project, the Polish parliament has endowed 100 million zloty (approximately A$34m.) and the profit from the investments made from this endowment will be made available for the Okopowa Street Cemetery project.

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Why, I wonder, is the government allocating the funds and what motivates of a young man like Lasczckowski, our affable and knowledgeable CEO-guide, an ethnic Catholic Pole, to oversee the restoration of a Jewish cemetery?

He answers as if his response should be self-evident. “Because, as a Pole, this is my heritage, too,” he says.

His tour focuses on culture and history. He emphasises that the cemetery has great historic and artistic value, pointing out sculptures and commenting on the Art Deco, Egyptian Revival, and modernist style tombstones that lie next to traditional, modest graves. The tombstones from the 20th century, written in Polish, Hebrew, or Yiddish, attest to how diverse the Jewish community of Warsaw was before the Holocaust.

Prominent Jews are buried here, Lasczckowski says – politicians, famous rabbis, inventors, economists.  He points to graves of Poles who fought for independence. “Most Poles don’t even know that there were many Jews who fought bravely for Poland and died as heroes,” he observes. “They don’t know that the Jews were a vital part of Polish heritage and culture.”

In the same vein, later we will visit the award-winning POLIN Museum. The museum is dedicated to the life, not the death, of Polish Jews, and tells the story of the Jews’ culture, politics – and oppression – across the centuries.

Six million Poles died in World War II, says Lasczckowski. Three million Jewish Poles, and three million non-Jewish Poles. The tally makes me uncomfortable. We aren’t talking about numbers, but about a fundamental question:  Did Jews in Poland die as Jews or as Poles?  “They died as Poles,” Lasczckowski says definitely. “Even those murdered by anti-Semitic Poles were murdered ‘by their own countrymen’.”

As we walk past the mass graves of Jews who died in the ghetto, the answer is clear to me, too: They died as Jews.
I tell Lasczckowski that I had always heard that “the Poles were worse than the Germans.”  He sighs. But you must know, the Jews who survived were those who came in contact with Poles, not Germans. Not all Poles saved Jews, but no Nazis did.

LATER, WE VISIT THE MUSEUM of the Warsaw Uprising –not the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but the museum dedicated to the uprising I hadn’t known about. The revolt by the Polish resistance, in which an estimated 200,000 were killed and hundreds of thousands more were sent to concentration camps, while the Russian forces looked on, nearby, just across the Vistula River. In retaliation, the Nazis destroyed over 90 percent of the buildings in Warsaw.

Every year on August 1, at 5 pm, the hour when the resistance started, sirens wail throughout Poland.  People and traffic come to a stop. In the past few years, the Poles have added another siren, at 10 am, on April 10th, marking the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.  We have sirens at home, too. The Holocaust Memorial Day siren blares out on the Hebrew date of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; the other siren goes off on Memorial Day for Israeli Soldiers and Victims of Terror.

Throughout the four days, as we Israelis and Poles become more comfortable, there is lots of banter, along with good food and good humour. We share the pictures of our children, stored in our smartphones.

But other times, the conversation is more like a ping-pong: The Israelis throw out the ball, the Poles return the serve.

I tell Lasczckowski that I had always heard that “the Poles were worse than the Germans.”  He sighs. ‘I know that many Jews think and feel that,” he says. “Maybe they felt more betrayed by the Poles than by the Germans, because they had lived together for so many centuries.  But you must know, the Jews who survived were those who came in contact with Poles, not Germans. Not all Poles saved Jews, but no Nazis did.”

And 1968, when the Polish government began a mass purge of Jews from the Communist party and the government, in an effort to make life unbearable for the Jews?

“There was no Polish government,” Wlodarczyk reminds us.  “Those events were horrible, but we were under Soviet occupation and it was a puppet regime.”

But almost all of Polish Jewry was annihilated, we argue.

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Yes, but the camps were not Polish death camps, they refute.  They were German death camps on Nazi soil, set up here in Poland because the largest number of Jews lived here. And there were no Polish guards in the camps – only Germans, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians.  And Poland never had a government like Vichy, that collaborated with the Germans; we were under full occupation.

As if to show that anti-Semitism is woven deep into the fibre of Polishness, someone brings up the name of Bogdan Chmielnisky, one of the most horrific oppressors in Jewish history, who led the Cossack rebellion in 1648 and 1657 while cruelly massacring tens of thousands of Jews and destroying their communities.

“He was a Ukrainian, not a Pole,” someone retorts.

Other times, it is the Poles who take the first serve. What about Israeli Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz, who repeated then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s statement that the Poles imbibe anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk. And didn’t the Jews often look down on their Polish neighbors, referring to them derisively as “the goyim”? Didn’t some Jews spit at priests as they walked by?  What about the prejudice against the Slavs on the part of “Westerners.”

And why do Israelis and Jews come to Poland to see the death camps, but don’t interact with the Poles today? And while we know about the evil events such as Jedwabne and Kielce, why  don’t we know more about brave writers and researchers, proud Poles like  Jan T. Gross, who exposed the poisonous combination of institutionalised and folk anti-Semitism, opportunism, greed, and desperation that is, they acknowledge, part of Polish history?

And while the suffering of the Jews is incomprehensible, didn’t we know how much the Poles suffered under the Nazi occupation and then under the Soviets?  Didn’t we know about the massacre at Katyn, which wiped out an entire generation of Polish intellectual, social and political elites (And that thousands of Jews were murdered there, too -  as Poles.)?

What about the nearly 7,000 Polish Gentiles who saved Jews? Did we know that, unlike in Western Europe, if a Pole was caught saving, or even helping, a Jew, he and his entire family would be summarily executed?

And in one, particularly difficult moment, I think: under those circumstances, would I have been willing to risk my life and the lives of my loved ones to save someone? I can’t honestly be so sure that I would have.
Would I have been willing to risk my life and the lives of my loved ones to save someone? I can’t honestly be so sure that I would have.

I RETURN HOME thinking about history and narrative, moral judgments, national identities and collective pride.

Our hosts are presenting a complex national narrative. They see Poland’s history as both tragic and heroic. They value the multi-culturalism and genuinely miss the non-ethnic Poles who were taken away, by the Nazis and then by the Soviets.

I don’t completely accept that narrative. It leaves out too much, ignores the indifference of most of the Poles during the Holocaust, glosses over the ongoing anti-Semitism and doesn’t attend to the unresolved issues, such as property restitution. Some of the perceptions are self-serving.

They are glorifying their victimisation.  As a Jewish Israeli, I am wary of national narratives based on victimhood.  I know only too well that when wielded by authoritarians, these narratives, combined with populist patriotism and tales of past heroism, can become dangerous weapons and foment hatred – by any nation, including our own.

But I also realise how little I know, and I think about what I have been taught – and deliberately not taught.  Don’t all peoples try to deal with their own histories by casting ourselves in our best light, searching for a proud, coherent, epic, collective story?

Our Polish hosts aren’t making comparisons, and there is no comparison to be made. As Polish journalist and Jewish activist Konstanty Gebert writes, the Jews, in Poland as elsewhere in German-occupied Europe, were to be totally exterminated, down to the last child hiding in the woods, and the plan was largely implemented. The Poles, on the other hand, were to be reduced to slave labor, and even this goal was not largely achieved.

They are asking for validation of their national story.  And while to me some of that story seems false, I know that to them it is true, and they are telling it honestly. They are asking for recognition of their suffering in World War II, of which the Holocaust was a part.  But for me, World War II was the Holocaust.  They mourn the loss of Poles, Jews and non-Jews.  I mourn the loss of my family and people.

Do I have to give up anything of my own story to understand theirs? I know, intellectually, that I don’t, but it’s hard to get past treating my people’s unique, unprecedented victimhood as a zero-sum.  And yet I know that for the sake of a better future for us all, that is exactly what we have to learn to do. Not only because that is the only way that Poles and Israelis and Jews can learn to talk to each other in the present, but because it is the only way that in a post-Holocaust world, we can help to make the future better.

That, I conclude, is the meaning of this dialogue.

Photo: A volunteer helps clean a Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, Poland (AP)

About the author

Eetta Prince-Gibson

Eetta Prince-Gibson, who lives in Jerusalem, was previously Editor-in-Chief of The Jerusalem Report, is the Israel Editor for Moment Magazine and a regular contributor to Haaretz, The Forward, PRI, and other Israeli and international publications.

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